“Surely that was theater; your skills are needed. Humanity will—”
“—will receive its collective fate: paralyzed souls, one and all. I don’t care.”
“You must care some,” said Szilard, “or you wouldn’t be bothering to tell me all this.”
Oppie frowned, thinking those same words again: Now I am become Death. In the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu, part of the Hindu trinity along with Brahma and Shiva, tries to persuade Prince Arjuna to do his duty. To impress the Prince, Vishnu takes on his multi-armed form and declares Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Vishnu succeeds, and Arjuna does what, as a warrior, he had been born to do.
Robert’s stomach churned. He, scion of the Ethical Culture School, had not been born a warrior, and this was not his fight.
“I’m telling you, Leo, because of your ... your passion. I’ve done my bit for King and Country. Oh, I’ll still work on atomic policy—Prometheus has an obligation to play fire marshal—but that’s it. As for the solar photospheric ejection? Teller thinks something can be done; maybe he’s right, but it’s not my department.”
Leo looked out at the city, countless thousands asleep. “Teller, yes. My old friend and fellow Martian. I can work with him. But ...”
“Yes?” prodded Oppie.
“The world was at war when the Manhattan Project began. We had no choice then but to crawl into bed with the army, the government. Hell, Robert, I was the one who got Einstein to write to Roosevelt. But we’re not at war anymore; we don’t need the military.”
“If you take this on, you will need resources,” replied Oppie. “Money, manpower. Washington can be your ally.”
“Metonymy, is it? Yes, perhaps we will need friends in high places but we don’t need the Pentagon, and we certainly don’t need the man who built it.”
“General Groves is—”
“An ignoramus. You know that, Robert.”
“He thinks highly of you.”
“As he should. I am—ah, you swap metonymy for sarcasm. Ask yourself, then: which of us is the indispensable man as we move forward, him or me?”
“The hawk or the dove, is that it?”
Szilard folded his arms in front of his sloping chest. “Answer my question.”
Oppie shook his head. “I simply say there are things that the military is good at. But you’ve been thinking up plans to save the world for years; this is your field, not mine.”
Leo had been born in 1898, and had spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s promoting his notion of “the Bund,” a society of intellectuals who would shape future civilization. He had indeed befriended H.G. Wells, a fellow utopian dreamer who had proposed a similar notion in one of his novels, and even for a time had served as Wells’s agent for translated editions.
Szilard shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Did you know I’d been contemplating a switch into molecular biology? Life rather than death, you see. But now ...” He paused. “Who else knows?”
“Several at Los Alamos; I’ll write up a list for you.”
“But not Groves?”
“No.”
“Good, good. Anyone outside of your New Mexico group?”
“Not yet.” And then, offering an olive branch: “You were the only person I thought to approach.”
Leo considered this then tipped his head. “I’m honored.” He turned fully toward Oppie. “But there are others who must be informed at once.”
“Who are you thinking of?”
“Number one has to be Einstein, of course.”
“He was denied clearance to work on the atomic-bomb project,” said Oppie. “His left-leaning ways.”
Leo raised eyebrows at the irony. “Denying Einstein but approving you. In any event, I know Albert well; I shall head to Princeton from here—it’s not far—and brief him myself.” He shook his head sadly. “A better man there isn’t; the government should be ashamed for having kept him in the dark during the war.”
“I know,” said Oppie turning toward the black night. “I swear, sometimes this country goes out of its way to vilify its most loyal servants.”
Chapter 20
I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.
—Harry S. Truman
Being uninterested in politics before Jean had come into his life, Oppenheimer hadn’t voted until he was thirty-two years old. He’d cast his first ballot for the 1936 re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal policies had appealed to Oppie’s recently kindled socialist sensibilities. He’d voted for FDR twice more: in 1940 and, in recognition of his support for the nascent United Nations, again in 1944.
And now, at last, Oppie was at the White House, having been granted a meeting with the president. But the occupant of the Oval Office was no longer FDR, a man Oppie would have loved to have met, despite some growing misgivings during the war years, but rather Harry Truman, who, in Oppie’s opinion, had botched things horribly at Potsdam by failing to bring Russia into an accord for international control of atomic energy; worse, Truman had needlessly prolonged the Pacific war by insisting on unconditional surrender, instead of just letting the Japanese keep their damned Emperor in the first place.
Sure, it was an honor to meet the president no matter who held that title. But just as some infinities are smaller than others—there are only half as many odd numbers as integers and yet both exist in endless profusion—so certain honors were inferior to their kin. Adding to Oppie’s muted mood was the fact that he was being escorted down the corridor not by Henry Stimson, the principled gentleman who had served as Secretary of War until his recent seventy-eighth birthday, but rather by his successor, Bob Patterson, in office all of a month now and bearing the same title even though the country was no longer at war.
After passing through the office of the president’s secretary, Oppie and Patterson entered the Oval from a door at the north end of its major axis, facing the empty desk. Oppie had only ever seen a couple of black-and-white pictures of this place in magazines. It was smaller than he’d imagined it, but really was elliptical; he judged its eccentricity to be about zero-point-six. The presidential seal was woven into the central blue-gray rug.
Another door to the room opened and in came Truman, three inches shorter than Oppie, with a round, full face, blue eyes behind thick lenses, and hair more gray than brown. “Dr. Oppenheimer,” he said, mispronouncing the surname by stretching the O into a long vowel. “A pleasure to meet you.”
“The pleasure,” replied Oppie, shaking the offered hand, “is all mine.” He had flown in for this meeting; this was his third trip to Washington since the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki, and all of them had been by plane. Without a word being said to him, the stricture against flying had been quietly lifted; even before his resignation, nine days ago, the government had decided he was no longer too valuable to risk losing in a crash.
FDR, even though he couldn’t stand up, had been a towering presence, but this Truman was just a workaday Missourian chosen as a compromise running mate for Roosevelt’s fourth term. Southern Democrats had objected to the flagrantly liberal Henry Wallace, who had been vice president up until this past January, and so now this man held the reins of power. More than that—Oppie had a flash of that Harvard physicist in the control bunker at Trinity—he was the one with his hand on the atomic lever, the only man in the whole world, at least so far, who had fission weapons under his command.
Really, for the task ahead, it should probably have been Szilard taking this meeting, not Oppie—but Leo had tried and failed once already to get in to see Truman, ending up with Jimmy Byrnes instead. He’d prevailed upon Oppie for this one task: perhaps the now world-famous laboratory director could succeed where Szilard had failed. Oppie had promised to report back with his assessment.
“Doctor,” said Truman, “won’t you and Secretary Patterson please have a sea
t?” There were short couches on either side of the rug. The president took the couch on the west side of the room; Oppie and Patterson sat on the other one.
“Congratulations and all that,” said Truman. “Now, let’s get down to it, shall we? This business of the control of nuclear weapons, right? The first thing is to define the national problem, then the international one.”
A dozen replies ran through Oppie’s head, none of them polite. For Pete’s sake, the primary concern had to be getting international controls in place rather than all this brouhaha about whether the military or a civilian agency would manage atomic matters domestically; any fool could see that—except, apparently, this fool. He looked at Patterson, but the Secretary’s long face was studiously neutral. “Actually, Mr. President,” Oppie said slowly, “perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem.”
“Well, when you get right down to it, there is no international problem,” Truman said. “We’re the only ones who’ve got this. You know when the Russians will have their own atom bomb?”
“As I told the House of Representatives last week, sir, no, I don’t.”
“Well, I do,” snapped Truman. “Never.”
“I assure you, Mr. President, the laws of physics are the same in Moscow as they are here; the Soviets will master this technology soon enough.”
“Like the damn Nazis did? Have you seen the reports from the Alsos mission into Germany? They’d thrown up their hands; it was too much for them to fathom. No, it’s like I said after we took out Hiroshima. No one but your team, and no country but America, could have made that happen.”
“You are ...” But, for once, Oppie managed to intercept impolitic words on their way out; he ended instead with “... too kind, sir.”
They talked for another twenty minutes, mostly about the May-Johnson Bill, the draft legislation that had been making Leo Szilard and others apoplectic. It treated nuclear matters as a state secret, rather than something the rest of the world was bound to gain access to, and threatened scientists who made even trivial violations of security with fines of $100,000 and a decade in prison.
Oppie wasn’t troubled about that. Getting any domestic legislation in place was a beginning; it could always be tweaked after the fact. No, he was here for a more important reason. It was crucial to take the measure of this Truman, to determine if he should be made privy to the pending solar calamity.
“What’s the matter, Doctor?” said Truman. “You look like you swallowed an anthill.”
Oppie glanced over at the desk and noticed a little sign on it: The buck stops here! He turned back to Truman and said, “Salus populi suprema lex esto.” It was the Missouri state motto—“let the welfare of the people be the supreme law”—and he’d expected Truman to recognize it, but the president just frowned. Oppie made another attempt, a trial balloon, a test: “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.”
Truman reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a white silk handkerchief, and shoved it toward Oppie. “Well, why don’t you wipe them, sonny boy?”
The two men locked eyes for a moment then Truman rose. “I think we’re done here.”
Yes, thought Oppie, rising as well. We most certainly are.
Chapter 21
Szilard is a fine, intelligent man who is ordinarily not given to illusions. Perhaps, like many such people, he is inclined to overestimate the significance of reason in human affairs.
—Albert Einstein
“Albert, my old friend!”
“My dear Leo. So good to see you!” Einstein, wearing a bulky plaid sweater, ushered Szilard into the small drawing room of his modest house on Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey.
“So,” Einstein said morosely in German after he’d sat down, each word separated by a puff on his pipe, “such a thing we started.”
Leo had been haunted by the same thought. If he hadn’t written that letter to FDR, and if Einstein hadn’t signed it, there would have been no Manhattan Project. The European war had ended of its own accord, and the Pacific war was now also over, days or weeks or maybe—just maybe—even months sooner than it otherwise would have inevitably concluded, and with the same side victorious. Perhaps American lives had been saved but the tally of human lives? More people were surely dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than any land invasion would have caused, and a toxic genie had been unleashed, the world forever changed.
Of the remaining chairs, Leo picked the most luxurious-looking one. “If I’d known then what I know now ...” he said, lowering himself down. He shook his head. “I naturally thought the Germans would be working on the same thing. I can’t believe Heisenberg made so little progress.”
“Do you know him well?” asked Einstein.
“No. Wigner and I once went to Hamburg to hear him lecture, and we spoke a bit after the talk, but that was all. But he was Teller’s thesis advisor; Edward has told me stories.”
“We crossed paths several times,” said Einstein. “We had a lovely walk together through Göttingen in 1924, and I saw him again in Berlin in ’26, and of course we were both at the Solvay Conference in ’27.” Einstein scraped the dottle from his pipe bowl and set about reloading it. “We disagreed on almost everything, although perhaps he’s come to his senses since. Uncertainty! Nonsense.”
Leo knew well of his friend’s aversion to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics; sadly, it was clear by this point—Einstein was now sixty-six—that the younger generation was passing him by. “Time will tell, Albert.”
“That it will. You’ve heard the joke about me? Einstein is riding in a railway car. He flags down the conductor and asks, ‘Does New York stop at this train?’” Einstein chuckled. “But there’s an even better one about Heisenberg. Old Werner is speeding down the road. A police officer uses a bullhorn to shout at him, ‘You’re doing a hundred and twenty!’ To which Heisenberg shouts back, ‘Thanks heaps—now I’m lost!’”
Leo nodded. He liked the version that continued with Heisenberg’s passenger being Erwin Schrödinger. The cop pulls them over, goes to look in the car’s trunk, and calls out, “Hey, do you guys know you have a dead cat back here?” To which Schrödinger shouts back, “We do now, asshole!”
Jokes. Jokes, because all that death, all that destruction, was too much to dwell on—during the day, at least. What Szilard would give for a good night’s sleep!
“I wonder if Heisenberg has heard the one about himself,” continued Einstein. “He’s not known for his sense of humor, but he’s a fine physicist. I nominated him for the Nobel three times before he won it.”
Leo nodded again. “Very kind of you.”
“Oh, he deserved it, no doubt. And concerning fission matters? Heisenberg is as competent as anyone. If he had wanted to ...” Einstein drew his pipe to life but said nothing more.
“Yes?” prodded Szilard.
“I think he threw the game,” said Einstein, lifting his shaggy white eyebrows. “Hitler and his monsters, what did they know of physics? A shifted decimal here, a reversed sign there. Heisenberg could have kept up a pretense of progress while making sure that those evil men were never given such power.”
Leo frowned and said to Einstein what his friend had said to him at the start of all this: “Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht!”
“A mere hypothesis,” replied Albert with a philosophical shrug. “Perhaps we’ll have evidence to test it someday.” He poured brandy from a decanter on a small table and offered the snifter to Leo, who waved it away. Einstein happily kept it for himself. “At least, for the moment, the world is safe.”
Szilard leaned forward. “For the moment,” he replied, “but not for long.”
“Leo, my boy, you are always such an alarmist!”
“Not at all. But I met with Oppenheimer a few days ago.”
“Ah,” said Einstein. “The man of the moment.”
>
“He tells me he sent you some equations to check.”
“Yes, that’s right. Wasn’t sure what it was all about but I’m always happy to help settle a bet.”
“It all caused quite a stir at Los Alamos, I’m told,” Leo said. “You know Oppie’s pre-war work was in stellar physics, and so was Hans Bethe’s. And Teller, also out there frying his brain in the desert, had devoted all his efforts for years now to fusion physics.”
“Dear Edward! I hope to see him and Mici again now that the war is over.”
Leo didn’t own a briefcase—even now, long after his narrow escape from Germany in 1933—he limited his possessions to those that could fit in a pair of suitcases. But he’d taken the laundry bag from his Princeton hotel and had a small sheaf of papers wrapped in it. He got them out. “Oppenheimer gave me these. He, Teller, Bethe, and others have double- and triple-checked the math, as have I. Have a look. And here are the spectrographs in question from 1929, 1938, and earlier this year.” He paused. “You’ll need some time with these. Might I take a bath while you look them over?”
#
Leo waited until Einstein called out his last name. He hoisted himself out of the claw-footed tub, checked the ornately framed mirror to see that his hair was still slicked back, put on a white terry-cloth robe—rougher than he’d have liked—and returned to the drawing room.
The normally unflappable Einstein was visibly agitated. He was standing by a heavy velvet curtain, drawn against the afternoon sun. His pipe was bowl-up in an onyx ashtray and he had his fingers interlaced in front of him. “So sad,” he said as if two words could encompass so much. “So sad.”
Leo took the same chair as before. “Then you agree with the conclusion?”
Einstein nodded ruefully. “I guess, in the end, even if Heisenberg did refrain from helping Hitler, his gesture was meaningless. Within a century, it’ll have made no difference who won the damnable war.”
“Well, we still have our lives to live out, and I prefer this outcome to the other possibility,” said Leo. “But, yes, the final generation to be born on earth may already be alive.”
The Oppenheimer Alternative Page 14
